A champion's pain: Ava Knight's belts don't come easily

Ava Knight (left) continues to drop opponents, like she did Linda Soto on May 11 for the WBC Diamond Belt, but Knight is still searching for top billing despite her lofty status in the world flyweight rankings. (Photo courtesy of Ava Knight)

There are times that Ava Knight, maybe the best pound-for-pound female boxer in the world, thinks it's not worth it.

It's not when she runs the three miles in 24 minutes, or the half-hour of high-intensity hill sprints, five mornings a week, because she knows the aerobic exercise is crucial to her stamina for the next fight against whatever challenger might creep forward. Besides, the cardio training is necessary to help her combat a recurring irregular heartbeat and asthma brought on by terrible year-long allergies that, at their worst, keep her barricaded indoors.

It's not in the afternoons, when she hits the gym for bag work — 10 2-minute rounds, every day, which is exhausting even for a world-class athlete. You can walk into any gym with a speed bag and find weekend warriors bent at the waist, sucking air from a minute straight of poking around a punching bag flat-footed; Knight dances on her toes around it, shifting her weight, bobbing, weaving and aching as the lactic acid burns in her legs, hammering away at the bag for 20 minutes, sometimes for half an hour, taking just 30 seconds sporadically to catch her breath before getting back to work. Other times, for a change of pace, it's 20 straight minutes with a weighted jump rope instead.

It's not during technique training, where Knight confesses to feeling the most mental strain, because everything is performed until it is perfect, and in the eyes of every demanding boxing coach, nothing is perfect. At least an hour a day is spent on technique, and just one aspect of it at a time. You can't even spend 10 rounds working on your jab, because there is no such thing as just "a jab." Knight moves with it, stands with it, has power and speed versions of it and more, and from every feasible angle a moving, gliding body can create, literally thousands of potential punches to be thrown that all must be polished, powerful and precise by the time Knight and her title belts finally manage to convince a fighter to challenge her. And the fighters seldom do.

Knight wants to fight everyone because she knows the work she puts into her craft, and it hurts her that anyone remotely close to her level has shied away. Her last four wins have been unanimous, the most recent being the usurping of the WBC Diamond Belt from Linda Soto on May 11. She has never been knocked down, never been knocked out and never, she believes, gotten a top-of-her-game fighter since Ana Maria Torres beat her in 2009 when the then-21-year-old Knight was suffering from food poisoning. Since that defeat, still her only professional loss, she's put together a diet and training regimen that would rival some bodybuilders' — and, indeed, she is even training now for a local bikini competition. She doesn't eat junk food, dairy, corn-fed meat, farm-raised fish, caged chicken or wheat products, including bread; she stays away from most carbohydrates, in general. A "cheat" meal for most is a Whopper or a slice of pizza. Knight's is a bowl of pasta with vegetables.

She was taking apple cider vinegar shots daily, but has since switched to pill form, making for a morning fistful of capsules including chlorella, coconut oil, fish oil, milk thistle, dandelion root and CoQ10. That's before lunch. After, it's a multivitamin, CLAs, more omega-3s and spirullina. She doesn't drink alcohol save for the rarest of occasions; even then, she considers that wine has more antioxidants than beer, and chooses accordingly.

"The diet is pretty simple," she says. "Walking around with a big belly isn't sexy and it's not comfortable."

But comfort has never been part of the deal for Knight, not since she started boxing when she was 13 years old. She's happened upon a sport where she still goes underrated, undernoticed and underpaid, despite her massive success and despite her male counterparts providing some of the most lucrative purses and popular storylines in American sports. Cynics like to say boxing is dead, but the Mayweathers, Pacquiaos, Hopkinses and Wards of the world have proven otherwise. Floyd Mayweather's last fight, a May 4 clinic in which he dispatched Robert Guerrero, got over a million pay-per-view buys.

In the meantime, Knight was on a plane for six hours after three weeks of altitude training in Big Bear at Shane Mosley's gym, now well used to the routine of crossing the border, beating up a Mexican fighter — she's earned the nickname "The Mexicutioner" from boxing fans throughout the country — and then jetting home, uncomfortable just about the whole time: "I can't eat the food there, I can't drink the water there, I have to leave my dog behind for a week and I'm in a country where I don't know the language." Then she jets home. It's a grind. And to best sharpen her skills, Knight trains with men who outweigh her by at least 50 pounds. They hit her, and it hurts. There's no room for politically correct sentiments in a boxing ring: Men are bigger and stronger, with more testosterone, and they hit harder, move faster and get angrier.

"There's two sides to it: Nobody's going to hit harder than a man, so you benefit from it. No woman has ever hurt me," Knight says. "But it also does something to you mentally. There's always the fear of when men start getting hit too much, when you are out-classing them, they will hit harder and out-punch and out-push you and they'll knock you down. And it happens. A lot of women deny it, but it gets to you."

But ah, the payoff. The pride of being handed a belt that says you're the best, the satisfaction of knowing one's work paid off, is all primary to Knight. But she's no sentimentalist and she's no dummy. She knows a raw deal when she sees one.

A week after Mayweather raked in his $32 million, Knight beat Soto a week later in Toluca, the broadcast only available streaming in Spanish online, with no American fanfare or viewing.

The purse? Knight says only: "You can just say it's under $10,000."

In some cases, promoters and opponents have demanded Knight's camp pay for the fight.

Knight would have loved to stay in West Oakland, at Champ Nation Boxing Gym, to continually hone her skills with Bay Area trainers. She tried to for a year, and couldn't afford a studio apartment the size of the office in which this story's interview was conducted. She'd teach boxing classes at the gym — she hated it — and after her paychecks went to rent, she had $25 a month left for food and gas. Eventually Knight, just two successful fights removed from knocking out previously undefeated Arely Mucino for the WBC flyweight belt, was forced to sleep at the gym. She moved back home to Chico and paid back her mother, who had helped support her, with some of her prize winnings.

It's not any one of these things that makes her think about stopping. It's the constant, putrid swirl of all of them together, looming over her head, making her think more than she'd like to. Boxing is her strongest passion, she truly believes there's nobody in her class better at it than she is and nobody's proven otherwise. She can do nothing more to earn respect as a fighter; in boxing circles, she's a champion, well-known and celebrated. In Mexico, she's a prized American villain, systematically dispatching everyone the country churns out from the opposite corner.

It's not enough.

When Knight and her father Eliot, a major source for Ava's love of the sport, were at Mosley's gym, he noticed the same father-fighter dynamic there and cracked that maybe he might have been like the Mosleys.

"I said, 'Well, you messed up,'" Ava says. "'You had a girl.'"

She jokes, but it's a serious problem. It takes a different kind of strength, one that no bag work can address, to block out the feelings she gets when she sees the state of women's boxing compared to men's and know she's a part of it, with no answers other than to just be a great fighter. It's all she can do to not dwell on it. When she does, that's when it hits her.

"I can't ignore it. I can't get lost in it. If I keep thinking about it, I might quit," she says. "There are some times, like my last fight, where I think, 'I don't know if I can keep doing this.' The training is so hard on my body, getting beat up by a guy every day for 10 rounds, my dad pushing me, the stress on my mind. ... There are times I think, 'This check isn't worth what I'm doing,' because it's just that hard."

Her father tried to get away from boxing years ago, but beyond his 50th year and, like Ava, suffering from asthma, he still wants to get in the ring. Same goes for all the coaches she grew up with, the Rodriguez family that ran the boxing gym where she laid down her fighter's foundation. That gym is long gone, but old Joe Rodriguez, one of Knight's former mentors, can't stand to be away from the sport. He and his son Lou have found another gym to ply their trade.

One day, maybe sooner than any of us want, Knight will truly mean it when she says it's not worth it anymore. When that moment comes, she'll have a reason for it, whether it's being punch-drunk or maybe something bordering on righteous. One day, the numbers might stop adding up, and the immense pride she has in what she's done may be all she has to show for the hills, the jump rope, the vinegar shots, the bag work, the body shots from male fighters.

But that day's not today. And we all should be thankful for that.

"Some days I walk out of the ring saying, 'It's not worth it anymore,'" Ava Knight says. "But at the end of the day, I just can't quit."